Hootsuite Hacks: 10 Tricks and Features You Probably Didn’t Know About

At Hootsuite, our customer success team members are experts in all things social. These people spend their days speaking to customers, walking them through any pain points and making sure they know the ins and outs of the Hootsuite dashboard.

We want to bring that expertise to you as well, so we sat down with Maria Perez, one of Hootsuite’s finest customer success associates. She let us in on a few handy tricks of the Hootsuite dashboard. These Hootsuite hacks will help you save time, stay organized, and do social media better—or you know, change your life forever.

10 Hootsuite hacks to make your life easier

1. See what people are posting on Instagram from inside your business

Ever wonder what people are posting on Instagram from inside of your establishment?

The Hootsuite dashboard allows you to set up location search streams. This is similar to place pages available on Instagram natively. You can see what’s being posted within a specified location—such as photos and videos shared in your brick and mortar location or from a physical event.

This Hootsuite hack for Instagram opens up yet another way to engage with your audience and potentially increase your customer base. Find out what people are excited about in real-time and in close proximity. This makes it easy to immediately address any customer feedback or problem.

How to do it:

2. Find out what people in the area are saying about your brand on Twitter

Wondering what the people next-door are saying about your business? How about, say, five blocks down?

Use geolocate to filter social media posts by location—right down to the exact coordinates. You can search hashtags, keywords, and even statements (e.g. “I love coffee”) to join in on local conversations.

This Hootsuite hack for Twitter allows you to connect locally by joining in on discussions that fall close-to-home—more opportunity to engage with your audience.

3. Stay organized by creating different tabs for different intents

The dashboard can be a lot to take in at once. To remain productive, our customer success team recommends keeping your tabs and streams as organized as possible.

Ways to organize your tabs:

By social media network—When you’re getting started, keep your tabs simple. We recommend creating tabs for each social media platform. Create a tab for all Twitter activity, keep another for Facebook, etc.

By inbound and outbound messages—Keep track of how your brand is interacting with clients. See what kind of questions and feedback are coming in—and what kind of responses are going out.

By audience personas—If you’ve got your buyer and/or audience personas nailed down, organizing your tabs by persona can provide an overview of how well you’re targeting your audience. You’ll get a better look at how specific personas are engaging with your brand, as well as a clearer understanding of their goals and pain points.

How to do it:

Select Streams from the launch menu

Click the tab name, enter a new name, and then press ENTER

Hot tip: Keep your names short, sweet, and relevant to your business. Your dashboard is fully customizable so that it works best for you.

4. Repost content (regram) on Instagram in only a few clicks

A regram is the Instagram equivalent of a Retweet on Twitter. It’s also a great way to showcase user-generated content.

Resharing content has a double benefit—you get to give props to the original poster (which encourages engagement), and you gain more content for publishing.

It’s a good thing you can easily reshare photos with this Hootsuite hack for Instagram.

How to do it:

Tap the post in the Instagram stream

Tap Reshare

Note: The post’s image and caption along with photo credit (@username) to the original poster will be populated in the compose box for you to edit, send, or schedule as desired.

5. Schedule up to 350 posts at once—now with images

Hootsuite’s Bulk Composer is all about saving you time. And now that the feature is image-friendly, you can add a ton of visually-engaging content to the posts you schedule in bulk.

As the ultimate timesaving tool, the Bulk Composer also allows you to:

Upload content quickly and easily—instead of hopping back and forth between social networks, schedule all your messages in bulk from one place.

Schedule hundreds of posts—up to 350 messages at a time.

Reach multiple timezones—use Bulk Composer to schedule your messages ahead of time to reach audiences all around the world.

Pre-plan campaign messages—draw your audience towards a big event, release, or product launch. Scheduling multiple messages to promote an event is a great way to build anticipation.

Improve consistency—being consistent with your updates can teach your audience when to expect new content from you. Avoiding pauses or sudden breaks in your social media schedule also ensures maximum engagement.

How to do it:

6. Easily see all your scheduled posts from the calendar view in Publisher

When it comes to viewing your scheduled posts, the Hootsuite Publisher function has a few options—by day, week, or month. The calendar view offers a complete overview of what you’ve been posting, what you’re scheduled to post, and where there might be publishing gaps.

As a visual representation of all your scheduled messages, calendar view acts as a content calendar. It’s a good place to check what you have coming up, and to make any necessary changes. You can drag, drop, or delete posts, and make edits where you see fit.

How to do it:

Select Publisher from the launch menu

Under Publisher, click Scheduled

Choose to see scheduled posts by List, Day, Week, or Month

7. Easily publish or schedule content in seconds right from your browser

So, you’re browsing the web and you stumble across a stimulating article that your followers would enjoy. Instead of copying and pasting the link and scheduling a new post in the Hootsuite dashboard—Hootlet does it for you.

Hootlet is the Chrome extension that brings the Hootsuite dashboard experience to your browser. Share a link to any of your social media accounts from anywhere on the web without ever having to open Hootsuite.

How to do it:

8. Find an app for any social media need in the Hootsuite App Directory

There are a lot of apps out there. With so many to choose from, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with which option might be the best fit for your social media marketing strategy.

The Hootsuite App Directory is a massive collection of apps and extensions to suit any social marketing need—from ecommerce to video marketing.

The Directory makes it easy to filter apps by category or social media platform and highlights some top picks for managing all the different aspects of your social media marketing strategy. For example, MailChimp is one of our top featured apps, as it helps create mass email marketing campaigns with ease.

To find an app to fit your needs, simply head to the Hootsuite App Directory site and choose your filter from the options on the left. Or you can use the search bar.

9. Schedule Retweets for round-the-clock engagement

You probably know that the Hootsuite dashboard lets you schedule social media posts in advance, but did you know that you can also lineup Retweets?

Retweets are a great way to share curated content that’s relevant to your business or acknowledge a member of your Twitter community.

How to do it:

Select Streams from the launch menu

Click the tab hosting the Twitter stream

Click the Retweet drop-down arrow and click Edit

In the compose message box, click Scheduling

Select the date and time you’d like to publish the message

Click Schedule

10. Customize link previews

You know that feeling when you share a post on Facebook but the link preview isn’t exactly what you imagined? Sometimes the thumbnail image isn’t even working.

As a social media marketer who’s focused on content curation, you want to control the posts you’re putting out there—down to every last detail.

It’s a good thing that the Hootsuite dashboard lets you customize link previews. You can choose a thumbnail image to display, and edit the title and description that’s published with your link.

How to do it:

Select a social profile from the Social Profile Picker in the top left-hand corner of the Compose box (this hack works for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Plus)

Click Add a link, enter or paste a URL, and then click Shrink. A link preview will automatically generate

Click the left or right arrows on the thumbnail image to select a thumbnail, or click Replace image to upload your own image

Optional: Click in the link preview title or description to edit the text

It’s important to note that link previews for LinkedIn must include a thumbnail image, title and description. If any of these are removed, LinkedIn will fill in the missing data when posted.

Custom thumbnail images can be a maximum of 5MB in .jpg, .jpeg, .gif or .png formats. Content library images cannot be used for link previews.

Posts can contain a link preview or an attached image, but not both. Either remove the link preview in the Compose message box so you can attach an image, or upload your own preview thumbnail.

Want to learn all the tricks and features of the dashboard? Check out our free platform training videos on Hootsuite Academy and you’ll become a Hootsuite expert in no time.